Customer asks a question in an EMC Community Forum. NetApp show up in that EMC Community Forum and try and flog him a V-Series. He tests the V-Series, rejects it and then posts the reasons why in the same Community Forum.
Where I will ensure it is viewable until the stars go dark and the universe collapses.
This has to be like waking up in the morning. Everything is good. You're doing well. And then the idea you're some "leader" in Flash evaporates because what you and your co-workers agree must be so (3PBs) at the company All Hands meeting in Sunnyvale is in no way connected with reality. (10PBs sold by EMC in 2010)
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All,
I thought this thread should have my results posted to it. We have done some extensive testing and had equipment from both vendors onsite. We read through many blogs, articles, white papers and manuals during testing. We used the same data sets and same VMware data stores for these tests.
Let’s start off with the technical specs:
1.) We found the EMC had faster CPU and more Memory per host and cluster
2.) Redundancy – The NetApp isn’t a true redundant system since the controllers are separate. As we saw NetApp was 4 9’s availability versus 5 9’s from EMC
3.) PAM/CACHE – The NetApp cache is read only versus EMC cache as read/write
4.) PAM/CACHE – When either controller reboots the CACHE is cleared versus moved to the other controller on EMC
Let’s discuss capacity now:
1.) We used 1.3TB of RAW disk capacity
a.) EMC had 81% of the RAW capacity as useable
b.) NetApp was 48% of the RAW capacity as useable
2.) Dedupe rates
a.) EMC was a 46% dedupe rate plus we saw gain from compression
b.) NetApp a was 90% dedupe rate
Results:
Manageability was one of the major concerns in our organization as well. NetApp is simple to manage while allowing a robust CLI and a great V-sphere plug-in. However filer view is a very old interface and needs some updating as well. With EMC's current platform, we found that Unisphere is a simple to manage platform and the new vSphere plug-in is robust and works great.
One thing we did note was that response time on EMC fiber channel LUN’s was better than the NetApp LUN’s. Now in our environment I’m not sure that would matter a whole lot but it was worth noting. Reading various blogs also indicated the same results on FC & iscsi; noting that EMC had better performance than NetApp.
I think there is no doubt that the WAFL file system is a great file system and block level dedupe beats out file/byte level dedupe. NetApp appears to have better response from a NFS mount perspective however we had some permission issues getting mounts to work on VMware which was seamless with the EMC.
All in all so far we couldn’t find a compelling reason to choose NetApp for our environment. I think in the end the dedupe differences seem to even out in regards to useable capacity. Well that’s it from our testing and research, I hope this ends up being helpful to someone else out there.
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